t confusion between the United States postal and customs
regulations to build up a trade by supplying through the mails
reprints of _American copyright works_, in editions which, being
flimsily printed, and free of charge for copyright, can be sold at
very moderate prices indeed.

It is very evident that, in the face of competition of this kind, the
payments by American publishers to foreign writers of fiction must be
materially diminished, or must cease altogether. These pamphlet series
have, however, done a most important service in pointing out the
absurdity of the present condition of literary property, and in
emphasizing the need of an international copyright law. In connection
with the change in the conditions of book-manufacturing before alluded
to, they may be credited as having influenced a material modification
of opinion on the part of publishers who have in years past opposed an
international copyright as either inexpedient or unnecessary, but who
are now quoted as ready to give their support to any practicable and
equitable measure that may be proposed.

I have endeavored to give in the foregoing pages an outline sketch of
the history and present position of the question of international
copyright, and to briefly indicate some of the relations in which it
stands to ethics and political economy.

We may, I trust, be able, at no very distant period, to look back
upon, as exploded fallacies of an antiquated barbarism, the beliefs
that the material prosperity of a community can be assured by
surrounding it with Chinese walls of restrictions to prevent it from
purchasing in exchange for its own products its neighbors' goods, and
that its moral and mental development can be furthered by the free
exercise of the privilege of appropriating its neighbors' books.

* * * * *

FREE TRADE,

AS PROMOTING PEACE

AND

GOOD WILL AMONG MEN.

_A paper read before the New York Free Trade Club, Feb. 20, 1879,
by Charles L. Brace._

To the moralist, Free Trade is not most of all important as a means of
producing and distributing wealth, (though in that it be the most
efficient) but rather as a portion of that movement of humanity which,
receiving its greatest impulse eighteen centuries ago, has been
steadily ever since removing prejudices, lightening burdens, doing
away with abuses, and bringing together into one, different classes
and peoples and races. Living under